Plenty of interesting news coming out of Cisco Live this week and I don’t want partners to miss anything! I’ll have a complete recap of the week for you, as always, in the Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind on Friday. In the meantime, here’s a quick recap of some of the blogs and announcements we’ve seen at Cisco Live so far this week.

Carolina Fernandez kicked things off prior to the show with a look at what Cisco is showcasing this week In Milan. Take a step back to the beginning of Cisco Live for an overview of the week. Read More »

Wow, what an activity on the first day at the Cisco Campus / World of Solutions. It’s great to see all these people thirsty for knowledge, and all these people looking for intelligent solutions for their business needs.

One of those business needs is removing complexity from networks by making networks self-managing, or in other words Autonomic Networking. 2014 will be the year that we are shipping the first sets of functionality in this space, so that makes us really exited. After all we have been working on this for more than 3 years internally, and its great to finally see the fruits of that hard work.

Michael has explained in his blog that Autonomics is all around us, but until now there wasn’t a solution that allowed other applications to leverage a common autonomic infrastructure. Finally it is here! The Autonomic Networking Infrastructure allows Service Providers to bootstrap new devices completely zero touch, in a secure fashion, without pre-staging the devices and/or a back-end DHCP Server, and this totally topology independent! Just plug in the device, and watch it getting authenticated, receiving a Domain Certificate, joining the Autonomic Domain, and joining the Autonomic Control Plane, which provides indestructible IPv6 end-to-end connectivity! If an mdns-enabled TFTP server is connected to the network, it will leverage the Autonomic Control Plane to announce its service, upon which the devices will pull in their configuration! Read More »

With encouragement from customers, Cisco has submitted the TrustSec protocol that we use to exchange role and context information between network devices to the IETF. Chris Young, Senior Vice President of Cisco Security, shared the news during his keynote address at Cisco Live! Milan.

The Source-group tag eXchange Protocol (SXP) has been submitted to the IETF as an informational draft, in order to open up TrustSec capabilities to other vendors. In our experience, defining access controls and segmentation functions using logical policy groups, instead of IP addresses and subnets, removes operational complexity for customers. When we authorize a user device or a server as a member of a policy group, SXP allows us to propagate that information to devices that reuse that intelligent classification and apply security policies based upon it.

We have published SXP to enable interoperability with TrustSec functions in widely deployed Cisco products, so customers can not only simplify security policy management in diverse networking environments, but also use the classification for other purposes beyond security. For that reason, we have used the term source-group, instead of the more familiar security group designation, in the draft.

Now more than ever financial services companies are wrestling with reducing costs, increasing revenue, and mitigating risk. Cisco Live Milan is a chance for Cisco customers and partners to learn more about innovations that can help address these challenges while meeting business goals.

This year at Cisco Live Milan, we have the following financial services industry sessions:

Today’s evolving financial consumer wants tedious transactions automated while valuing interactions that enhance their financial situation. Did you know 2/3 of banking customer segments want anytime-anywhere full-service banking … and will not do business without it? Learn how Cisco can make you a hero at your bank … by enabling omnichannel banking to increase your wallet-share!

As ultra-low latency architectures become the foundation of trading fabrics, embedded analytics and instrumentation capabilities are critical to capturing key opportunities in a fast-paced market. Due to these growing data analytic requirements within the architecture, scalable fabrics—without compromised latency—are becoming more important. Learn how Cisco’s High-Performance Trading Fabric is unique in the marketplace in its ability to enable competitive advantage in the form of capturing sustained trading Alpha.

If you are attending Cisco Live Milan, we invite you to visit us in the Cisco Collaboration exhibit area in the World of Solutions where we will show you how you can transform your customer interaction business model to:

Improve sales, cross-sales, and upselling

Acquire customers faster

Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty

Control costs and boost efficiency

Enhance regulatory compliance

We will be demonstrating the newest release of Remote Expert, a solution that is gaining adoption around the globe. Why? Here is what one financial institution is saying:

“The Cisco solution has helped us improve customer satisfaction and staff efficiency while at the same time increasing mortgage sales. The business case in favor of the Cisco solution stacked up quickly.”

If you are already registered to attend Cisco Live Milan, you can register to attend these sessions on your Cisco Live Schedule Builder today. For more general information on Cisco Live, please visit the main event website here.

Ciao! The data center and cloud management software team is in Milan this week to showcase our Unified Management solutions in the Data Center and Cloud booth as well as the Cisco ONE Platform booth at our annual Cisco Live customer event in Europe.

So, please check out the live demos, join our breakout sessions, and take this opportunity to how our Cisco’s Unified Management software solutions can help your organization improve efficiency, become more agile, and reduce costs.

See below for details and stay tuned for some exciting announcements …

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